Windows Azure Services for Windows Server VM Cloud

Windows Azure Services for Windows Server VM Cloud gives Hosting Service Providers the ability to provision a Virtual Machine Cloud on Windows Server 2012 machines in their datacenter. Virtual Machines running on a Virtual Machine Cloud are highly scalable, accommodate multiple tenants, and can be deployed and administered with ease using the Service Management Administration Portal.

Key Benefits of Windows Server VM Cloud

Windows Server VM Cloud is one of the first Cloud services developed for Windows Server 2012 as a result of the Microsoft Cloud OS initiative. Windows Server VM Cloud provides outstanding platform consistency with Windows Azure Virtual Machines. End users (or Tenants) familiar with using Windows Azure Virtual Machines will feel right at home working with the new Windows Server VM Cloud service. Benefits of Windows Server VM Cloud include:

Tight Integration with Systems Center 2012 SP1 – Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 includes Service Provider Foundation (SPF) which exposes an extensible Open Data Protocol (OData) API over a Representational State Transfer (REST) web service. The Service Management Tenant portal leverages the SPF OData API to make available the multi-tenant IaaS capabilities provided by Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1.

Multi-Platform – Supports both Windows and Linux guests and also provides access to Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager integration with both the VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer hypervisors.

Flexibility – The Windows Server VM Cloud service makes use of Windows Azure Virtual Machine management capabilities enabling you to migrate on-premises Virtual Machines to run in Windows Azure. Hosting providers can configure virtual machine templates for various workloads. Tenants can then select the appropriate template and quickly provision the right size virtual machine for their workload requirements with minimal guesswork.

Pooled resources – Hardware resources are pooled and allocated into logical units that can be dynamically provisioned. Dynamically provisioned resources can be easily allocated to exactly where they are needed when they are needed.

Self-service functionality – When applications and resources are provided as services, tenants can provision, configure and manage these services via the Service Management Tenant portal.

Elasticity – Arguably the greatest benefit of pooling hardware resources into logical units is that logical resources can be scaled up or down with nominal effort. The flexibility to quickly scale up or scale down logical resources is also referred to as elasticity and cloud based logical resources enjoy a huge advantage over hardware-based resources in terms of elasticity.

Usage based billing – Another benefit of pooling hardware resources into logical units is the ease with which logical resource usage can be measured at a very granular level. By keeping track of each tenant’s use of logical resources tenants enjoy the full confidence of knowing they are billed precisely for those resources they have elected to use, no more and no less.